News & events
Turkey's own refugees: Now Kurds turn to Europe for help
While European leaders woo and praise Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for generously hosting hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, none of them mentions a discordant fact: more than 400,000 of his Kurdish fellow-citizens, who were displaced by the war in south-east Turkey last year, have received no government aid and still cannot return home, according to aid groups. - Jonathan Steele, Middle East Eye, 28 February 2017
The irony, if not hypocrisy, is all too clear to Huseyin Durmaz, a leading official in the Sarmasik Association, a Kurdish aid group in Diyarbakir, which is struggling to use private donations from ordinary people to help the homeless in the absence of funding from Ankara.
Whole communities lost their houses, and an estimated 1,600 people lost their lives during nine months of clashes which erupted after the collapse of the ceasefire between the government and the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) in July 2015.
Read more: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/turkeys-own-refugees-kurds-turn-europe-help-1255366989